Last week was the Supply Side West Show in Las Vegas. Aiya America was an exhibitor for the show. The exhibit was only open for 2 days on October 12th & 13th. Supply Side West and IFT (Institute of Food Technologists) show are the largest two ingredient shows in US. Aiya America has been an exhibitor at both shows for a long time and have seen a trend of companies looking for healthier and all-natural ingredients.

The show was rather big in terms of the amount of exhibitors that attended. The amount of attendees was small and traffic was a bit slow at times. But on the upside of things the potential of landing a big client is much higher since this show was strictly dealing business to business. Many attendees are looking to develop new products and are looking for ingredients.

Aiya’s main business is providing Matcha green tea as an ingredient because Matcha comes in powder form it is very versatile and can be used in mainly applications. I’m sure many people know green tea ice cream is made using Matcha but do you know Matcha is also used in cosmetic products in the US (i.e. body lotion, face mask etc)? Of course the main use of Matcha is for straight drinking tea, but it’s also used in many other drinks and for culinary purposes like ice cream, baked goods and other desserts. Matcha also is great ingredient to use in dietary supplements, pills, energy drink and energy bars to boost nutritional value. There are so many applications, the uses are only limited by your imagination.

Some trends we noticed at the show were lots of energy drinks in today’s world use a lot of artificial ingredients for energy, but companies are now looking for healthy, all-natural alternatives to provide natural energy in their drinks. That’s where Matcha comes in and companies are noticing the benefits of Matcha as an ingredient that provides natural energy, amino acids, antioxidants and many other nutrients. There are already companies combining Matcha with other natural ingredients to create all-natural energy drinks.

At the show we had the opportunity to see a lot of our clients and meet a lot of people we have business relationships with. So it was great to be able to talk and build on our relations. We also had the opportunity to learn about new companies and their services that could help us down the future to grow our company. Matcha is still a new product for people in the U.S. so we still have to educate and introduce Matcha and the many applications it has.

The Supply Side West seems to be growing since more people are becoming health conscience about what they eat and ingest. Supply Side West is more geared toward the nutritional and supplement industry.

We had a good time, and hope that we got more people interested in Matcha green tea.